Turbines from Europe

Friday

Apr 11, 2014 at 12:01 AM

The Northeast is placing a huge bet on offshore wind power to usher in the green-power revolution of reduced pollution and CO2 emissions. In Rhode Island, Deepwater Wind has plans to install five wind...

The Northeast is placing a huge bet on offshore wind power to usher in the green-power revolution of reduced pollution and CO2 emissions. In Rhode Island, Deepwater Wind has plans to install five wind turbines in waters southeast of Block Island and, if that goes well, 200 more in Rhode Island Sound at a site some dozen miles to the east. In Massachusetts, Cape Wind is persevering in its plans to site a 130-turbine array in Nantucket Sound.

Cape Wind, which has hired the German manufacturer Siemens to supply the turbines, is setting up staging operations in New Bedford. Deepwater Wind turned to the French corporation Alstom for its turbines, which it plans to assemble at Quonset Business Park in North Kingstown. Alstom is also the manufacturer of Amtrak’s Acela high-speed train.

Much has been made of the fact that these will probably be the first offshore wind farms in U.S. waters. Germany, Denmark, Britain, the Netherlands and France have placed hundreds of turbines offshore, from which they generate considerable amounts of electricity. The hope is that New England’s early entry into a field where the U.S. government continues to sell offshore wind-farm leases and that may eventually see worldwide demand for relatively nonpolluting energy production will produce significant spin-off opportunities for the local economy, with large numbers of jobs.

By that measure, plans for Cape Wind and Deepwater Wind will be disappointing for a while. Neither Siemens nor Alstom has expressed interest in setting up manufacturing operations on this side of the Atlantic to fabricate the blades, weld the pylons and wind the rotors in the turbines. Hiring will be for jobs in assembly and set-up work — not negligible, but numbered in the low hundreds rather than thousands.

Quonset, where Electric Boat manufactures components of the Navy’s submarine fleet, boasts a highly skilled workforce in relevant areas of this process, as well as plenty of space.

The number of jobs may change as the nascent industry develops — and we hope it does. Indeed, the jobs that will come are a step in the right direction. Alstom intends to base long-term operations at Quonset. Still, the Ocean State has the highest unemployment rate in the United States, and more manufacturing would be nice.